1. Field of the Invention
This invention generally relates to digital document processing and, more particularly, to a system and method for using the saved bitmaps of previously printed documents to expedite reprinting.
2. Description of the Related Art
In an office environment there is often a need to reprint documents. For example, a user sitting at their desk may require another hard copy of a document that they printed last week. Unfortunately, the document is 1000 pages long, and took 2 hours to print the first time. In this situation a reprint could be created faster if the printer controller had access to the bitmap used for the initial printing.
Conventionally, this problem has been incompletely addressed. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,089,765 describes the use of a front panel to select the file from printer memory to be used for printing. This method is inconvenient if the user is at their desk, and the front panel is a poor substitute for a keyboard and monitor. U.S. Pat. No. 4,630,198 describes the use of a printer's RAM as storage, but only on a single job basis. Again, no convenient file access is described.
US Publication 2003/0133167 describes the storage of only photographic images on the printer, but not other types of input. US Publication 2001/0029513 adds an identifier to the initial hard copy. The identifying mark can subsequently be read in, decoded, and used to retrieve the soft copy for printing. U.S. Pat. No. 6,089,765 describes the storage of data in a user's computer, not in the printer. The bitmaps must be sent over the network to the printer. This delivery takes time and creates a network traffic burden.
It would be advantageous if a printer could save the bitmaps used for the initial printing on its hard disk. It would also be advantageous if the printer maintained a table that cross-referenced a job identifier to the location of stored bitmaps in memory.
It would be advantageous if the reprinting of documents could be accomplished by retrieving the bitmap of the initial print job using a job identifier sent to the printer from a user's personal computer (PC).